Member Spotlight: Wollongong West St Centre

NCOSS spoke to Michelle Fraser, service manager of the Wollongong West Street Centre.

Tell me about West St Centre and its history.

We had our 40th anniversary this year. The centre grew out of the feminist movement at the time to address issues around childhood sexual assault.
Two women, who were social workers, got the funding and initially it was a program of community awareness raising and community education. Then the state government said we’d like to turn your funding into a counselling service and would you would you like to retrain with these skills?

So that’s how it happened. In about 1992, we held a controversial fashion parade that was a fundraising event. It was controversial because at that time, some people in the feminist movement didn’t think that fashion parades should exist in relation to serious issues. But it raised something like $12,000 at the time, which allowed us to pay for a deposit to buy a property, which is still the property that we operate from. And that’s given the West Street Centre a bit of an advantage because a lot of the services that were funded at the time through DCJ have ceased to exist.

There’s a group of services called Child and Adolescent Sexual Assault Counselling Services who do this work. But over the years, one of the political issues is that the group of services that do this within a community-based framework has been enormously eroded, and so we’re about a third to a quarter of the size that we were back in the 90s.

So does that mean that there’s a disappearance of these services?

The majority of general sexual assault service delivery occurs within the health sector, but child sexual assault then gets layered under all sorts of adult sexual assaults and rapes and one-offs, and then it all gets smooshed into domestic violence as well.

Often people who are adult survivors of sexual assault, who maybe haven’t had such a good life experience of being responded to, they’re deprioritised in NSW Health. So, it’s a social justice issue that we continue to be around because we focus on child sexual assault, whether it’s children or adults. We keep that as our focus focus, and it doesn’t get lost in the smoosh of every single violence against women and children that can happen.

Tell me about the way the people who use your service create spaces that promote healing.

About 18 years ago, the centre started a social support group for women that was peer-led, and that’s very unusual in the sexual assault space.

We’re just about to publish about it. What the women who use our service say is that they feel that this is a space where they can be with others who have a genuine understanding of what they’ve lived through, even though it might not be the same. They can be who they are, and it’s a kind of a paradox, isn’t it? That you can recover through connections with others who tell you you’re okay as you are.

We’ve also just been funded to do a pilot in community-based restorative justice.

We’ve received a DCJ-funded Sexual Violence Recovery and Healing grant and we’ve partnered with another not-for-profit called Transforming Justice Australia, who promote alternatives to the criminal justice system around sexual assault.

We know that the criminal justice system doesn’t work, and we know that systems harm people when they disclose. So, what we’re going to do is create a community of practice.

It doesn’t have to involve offenders or people who’ve harmed. We’re not just focusing on victims meeting with the person who harmed them, we’re going to be a lot broader than that. We’re going to think about ways in which women can tell their stories. Like when the Child Abuse Royal Commission happened. They told their story to important people who were there to listen, and that helped their recovery.

Oftentimes, court processes harm a victim as well. Even if they do get a good outcome — like the few people I’ve talked to who have had an outcome where the person ends up in jail — it doesn’t necessarily mean it was a good experience.

And then on top of that, you’ve got mostly men who harm going into a violent prison system. So, there are no winners in that.

How much demand are you seeing at your centre?

Obviously, there’s always too much demand, and I think that the whole sector, wherever you look at it, there’s too much demand. I’ve been trying to balance the budget for next year, and it’s increasingly difficult to do that, and I think that that’s probably the same across the sector. Essentially there’s an acknowledgement that we’re just going to have to reduce service hours in order to meet budgets in the future.

We’re already small, and then you’ve got all of these greater funding requirements and more time on people like me actually not doing the service delivery, just managing the process.